


Open Doors and Manual Locks

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romantic Angst, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 03:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3712339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As so many things in her life do, it starts and ends with Oliver Queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Doors and Manual Locks

**Author's Note:**

> Speculation for 3x19/20-ish. Title credit goes to The Lumineers because they get me.

Felicity remembers the first lie her mother ever told her, sitting on their kitchen floor in the dusty light of a setting sun. She remembers the way her small hands curled into fists, the way her nails bit into the skin of her palms. She remembers the sound of a fading engine, the scent of day-old rain on hot pavement carrying through the window on a stale breeze, the way her heart seemed to just barely rattle out a beat inside her ribcage.

“Oh, sweetheart, he would be here if he could,” her mother had whispered soothingly, her lips glistening with salty tears as she pressed them to Felicity’s temple and cradled her within shaking arms. “He didn’t have a choice.”

She remembers the numbness of ice-cold abandonment morphing into white-hot anger the minute the words left her mother’s mouth, because she knew, even at eight years old, that there was _always_ a choice. The anger, small and hard, nestled just below her sternum.

Growing up, Felicity didn’t live a privileged life. As a kid, her decisions were between meals or books, new clothes or fresh toiletries, heat or electricity. As a teenager, things got more complicated. Community college or student loans, ten miles of distance or a thousand, being trapped inside a world where she would never fit or breaking her mother’s heart.

But she made them—choice after choice, broken heart after broken heart; she made her choices, and she lived with them. The small ball of resentment for her father swelled, a small balloon behind her rib cage, and stuck. Maybe her choices sucked, but they were always there; they were always hers to make—black or white, right or wrong. Her father had a choice to make, and he had chosen wrong. She refused to follow suit.

Even now, it is a morality she holds onto with every fiber of her being, tucked right into the center of that little balloon. She had carried it with her throughout high school, throughout college, and all the way to Starling City. It is so ingrained in her, this sense of right and wrong and the accompanying need to choose wisely, that it’s a physical blow to her chest when, suddenly—one day—the balloon bursts.

As so many things in her life do, it starts and ends with Oliver Queen.

“You’re here?”

Felicity glances up from her tablet as Ray walks through the glass doors to her office, plucking the pen from between her lips as she looks at him in mild surprise.

“I—yeah?” she says, gesturing over her shoulder with the pen towards the boardroom. “We have a board meeting. _I_ have a board meeting—why are _you_ here? They discharged you?”

 “Since I’m apparently in perfect working order, yes,” he says, nodding. “Thanks to you.”

Felicity gives him a faint smile. “Good.” And then—“Wait, why wouldn’t I be here?”

Ray shrugs and looks down at the leather portfolio clutched in his hands. “I just—I figured you’d be out with Oliver on some official Arrow business.”

She furrows her brows, slowly spinning around in her chair to face him more directly. “Why would you think that?”

He looks at her curiously. “Because he came in here twenty minutes ago asking to borrow my jet.”

“He did _what?_ ”

“You didn’t know?” Ray asks, looking more confused than worried now as she stares at him. “So…you don’t know what he’s doing?”

“I—no, I don’t know what he’s doing,” Felicity says, feeling dread seeping into her bones. Because whatever it is that Oliver’s up to, it can’t be something good. In fact, it’s probably something of the insanely stupid variety, what with Ra’s al Ghul traipsing around Starling City like Death himself.

“What did he say to you?” Felicity asks. She can already feel her fingers start to fidget anxiously of their own accord.

“That he needed my plane, and that it couldn’t wait,” Ray says. “He said he had to go help his sister.”

Felicity’s stomach turns to stone. Cords of dread wrap around her middle and _squeeze_.

“Thea?” she asks, putting down her tablet slowly and trying to control the tremor in her voice. “Did he say why? Or where he was going?”

Ray shakes his head. “Only that he’d get someone to return the jet to me as soon as he could.”

The stone plummets right to her feet, but it steadies her as she rises from her chair.

“Shit,” she says, the word dropping straight from her brain to her mouth and coming out short and harsh. She runs her hands over the materials on her desk, scrambling to gather herself as her mind floods with a tidal wave of assumptions and quickly sorts through to find the one conclusion that she knows, above all else, to be true.

_I’m someone who will do whatever—_ whatever _—it takes to save my sister_.

“Shit,” Felicity says again as her fingers finally land on the jacket draped over her chair, as if her body knows what she’s going to do before her brain does.

“Ray, I’m so sorry,” she stammers out. “I can’t—I have to—”

“Go,” he finishes for her, the word holding such a certain weight that just the single syllable has Felicity snapping her gaze to him warily. “You have to go.”

“Yeah,” she says, “I do.”

It’s an apology in and of itself, because Ray’s words, his implications—they do have weight to them. It’s weight that Felicity has been piling onto their relationship ever since Oliver came back. Ever since she distanced herself from Ray that day in his office, ever since he found out the Arrow’s identity, ever since he gave her a misguided _I love you_ and she gave him hospital jello in return.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats sincerely, one last time, taking just a moment to lament over the fact that this relationship has been filled with so many apologies and lies and explanations that it was already too bloated to cram a future inside, too.

He looks at her for a moment, battling to make a choice, and Felicity lets him—even as she itches to get away.

“Don’t be,” he says finally, and her chest deflates with something like relief. Freedom. He looks at her knowingly. “I know what it’s like to have someone like that.”

She humors him one last time—she doesn’t owe him anything, but she’ll give him this. “Someone like what?”

A part of her—the biggest, most important part of her—knows the answer even before he says it.

“Someone who is an absolute,” he says with an ever-present nostalgia. “Someone who isn’t a choice to make.”

x-x-x

Oliver is less than enthusiastic when she shows up, breathless and disheveled, at the entrance to the plane.

“No,” he says the minute he spots her there, bag in hand, and Felicity doesn’t think she’s been more unsurprised at a reaction in her entire life. At this point, it’s verging off of predictable and onto boring.

“I’m coming,” she says firmly, looking around quickly, but the cabin is empty. She figures that John—darling John, who left seven messages on her drained phone, bless him and his stellar communication skills—must be looking around the different compartments. The _many_ other compartments, because holy Ben Franklin and all the hundred dollar bills is this a swanky jet.

“No, you’re not,” he tells her firmly, taking a step towards her like he’s trying to guide her away.

Felicity doesn’t retreat. In fact, she moves forward and to the side, distancing herself from the only exit.

“Yes, I am.”

“You don’t even know where—”

“You’re going?” she interrupts, raising her eyebrows like she does when he’s on the cusp of insulting her intelligence, how deeply and truly she knows him. “You’re going to Nanda Parbat,” she says challengingly, “to save Thea. To get your sister back.”

And just as she says it, she can see his careful mask collapse to reveal the truth—the dark, haunted shadow that stares out at her from behind his features. The strain at the corner of his eyes and across his cheekbones. The grief and despair that cloaks his shoulders and seeps beneath his skin.

Because he will save his sister, even at the cost of his own life. Felicity knows it with every aching bone of her body that still echoes with the pain of what it was to lose him.

“He killed her,” he says brokenly, his voice filled with unspeakable anguish. “I have to go.”

And there it is. The balloon, so steadfast and resilient, breaks.

She feels the wispy remnants of it hanging off the branches of her splintered heart, letting the pain mirrored on Oliver’s face edge its way into her chest with prying fingers.

This is not black or white. This is not right or wrong. Thea is not his choice—she is his absolute. He has suffered the pain of a thousand lifetimes, and he will suffer the pain of a thousand more if it means saving his sister. It is not an option.

“Oliver,” she says softly, stepping towards him, reaching out for him, but he steps back.

“I don’t want you there,” he tells her desperately, looking frantic and lost as he tries to throw up any of the barriers that she has already stripped away. “It’s not safe.”

“I don’t care,” she tells him, dropping her bag down at her side. “It’s my life, Oliver. It’s—”

“Your choice,” he says stiffly, looking away from her. “I know.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head with a certain finality, like she’s just figuring it out herself. And maybe she is. “No, you don’t know. Because it’s _not_ a choice. Not for me,” she tells him fiercely. Thea may be his absolute, but he is hers. “You—you always think you’re making choices. Oliver Queen or the Arrow. The Arrow or Ra’s al Ghul. Me—” Her voice wobbles a bit, and she swallows, glancing away. “Me or the city.”

She takes a deep breath and raises her eyes again to meet his. “But you once told me that there wasn’t a choice to make,” she tells him, taking another step forward. This time, he doesn’t back away, his stare fixed on her with the combined intensity of every star in the sky and the gravity of all the dark space in between. “And that’s what I’m telling you now.”

He doesn’t argue, doesn’t answer; he just gazes at her like he always has, like the beat of her heart is the sun he revolves around. Thea is his absolute, but the way he looks at her is infinite.

And then his hands drop to his sides helplessly, his shoulders slump in defeat. His eyes are glassy and blue and drive deep into her soul.

“This isn’t a choice I ever wanted to make,” he tells her, a fractured confession that sears through her skin like a flame. “This isn’t the man I wanted to be. This—I never wanted this, Felicity.”

Two of her slow, careful steps close the distance between them. She rests one hand feather-light against his chest and slides the other across his jawline. He’s shaking beneath her touch, overwhelmed with sorrow for his sister and the loss of a life he has no choice but to leave behind.

_No choice_ —and it never applied to her father, not once, but it does apply to this. She finds the truth of it in Oliver’s eyes.

“You do whatever it takes to save your sister,” she tells him softly, intently. She watches as her words sink through to him, her voice wrapping around his bones with ironclad support. “That is the man you are. That is the man you have always been, Oliver, and that— _that_ is the man I love.”

He leans into her, his breath coasting over her forehead and his eyes falling shut as he lets himself—for just a moment—find solace in her presence, her words, so immovably stable in front of him. When his eyes open, they burn into her own as if the secret to his salvation is written there in the ocean blue.

“Felicity,” he says, her name a prayer, a surrender—the only word he speaks with not a trace of hopelessness embedded in its roots.

“I’m coming with you,” she says resolutely, leaning into his chest and moving her arms to wrap around him. “I am. Okay?”

His heart is pounding frenetically beneath where she’s pressed her cheek, but his arms are steady in the way they bind around her waist, holding her to him like she is the only thing that anchors him to this earth. She feels it—the veracity of this, him, _them_ —to the very tips of her toes when he leans down, rests his temple against her own and nods into her hair. It’s another choice, and finally— _finally_ —he makes the right one.

“Okay.”


End file.
